Welcome to the treasury multiverse: Which future will you choose? - Trade Treasury Payments

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Welcome to the treasury multiverse: Which future will you choose?

Marvel’s Doctor Strange might not have many obvious parallels with the average treasury leader. But a new report looking at the ‘Future of Treasury’ provides a stark reminder that the choices we make today shape the consequences we experience tomorrow.

According to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the multiverse is a chaotic collision of timelines, where every decision creates a new, diverging reality. Treasury might not be quite so rich in special effects but competing versions of the future are still unfolding in parallel, influenced by the tech (and people) choices treasurers make today.

In one vision, teams are still emailing spreadsheets, chasing approvals, and praying the TMS can keep up. In another, AI has already executed the trade, swept the cash, flagged the fraud, and pinged the CFO with a summary – all before 10am.

J.P. Morgan Payments’ recent Future of Treasury report doesn’t suggest treasurers choose between those timelines. It states quite clearly that the sophisticated tech one is already here and happening. 

Indeed, the paper paints a picture of the profession at an inflection point, framed around four strategic pillars – technology transformation, risk intelligence, payment modernisation, and in-house banking. The overriding message is that treasury is no longer just moving from manual to digital, but from strategic to autonomous. Yet, according to the findings of the report, most teams aren’t ready for this shift.

Agentic AI reshapes decision-making

Tristan Attenborough, Global Head of Treasury Advisory at J.P. Morgan, notes: “Many treasury teams still think AI means better dashboards. But what’s coming is hands-free execution and a system that understands your rules, analyses real-time data, and acts accordingly. That’s not science fiction – that’s starting now.”

It’s particularly interesting as a treasury development because agentic AI acts without waiting for human input, albeit based on defined parameters. The implications are enormous: forecasting becomes continuous, risk management becomes predictive, and payment controls become self-healing.

What’s more, in a world of real-time payments and data (and increasingly lean treasury teams), this kind of AI ‘help’ will be needed to ensure a timely response to uncertainty. “Disruption is no longer an outlier, it’s the baseline,” Attenborough notes. “And while responses to black swan events use to require preparedness as a one-off exercise, the call here is for permanent agility. That means real-time visibility, embedded controls, decentralised execution models, and proactive stress testing that runs in the background, continuously updating risk assumptions as new data arrives.”

Attenborough is fairly blunt about the stakes. “When crises move in real-time, you don’t get two weeks to run a risk committee anymore,” he says. “You get hours, maybe less. And the teams that had distributed cash visibility, pre-approved fallback rails, and autonomous triggers in place during recent events recovered faster. That’s the benchmark now – and it’s an important area where AI and automation are becoming competitive enablers.”

As a result of these shifts, the traditional roles of approval, reconciliation, and exception handling are also being recast. “The treasurer’s remit is shifting from operator to orchestrator, no longer bogged down in running processes, but designing the guardrails within which intelligent systems operate,” explains Attenborough.

The great ERP migration 

Despite the clear benefits on offer, where does that leave treasurers who feel under-resourced or out of the loop on broader enterprise tech initiatives? And how can they get ahead, despite the obvious obstacles?

The Future of Treasury report suggests a clear starting point, namely advocating for cloud migration for ERP and TMS systems (only 53% currently have a cloud-based ERP). It might not grab headlines, but it’s become one of the most consequential shifts in treasury infrastructure. And with SAP set to end support for legacy ERP systems by 2030 and Oracle by 2035, the clock is ticking. 

It’s also hard to argue against the benefits when ERP cloud migrations are forecast to return $3.86 for every $1 invested. That figure that becomes even more compelling when considering the additional functionality unlocked for treasury teams – from dynamic API connectivity to embedded AI modules (although it is still early days), and improved data analysis functionalities. 

Drowning in data (but still thirsty)

Alongside having the right tech infrastructure, one of the core themes of the paper is data preparedness. While much has been said about data being ‘the new oil’, the reality for most organisations is that their liquid gold remains firmly buried! 

According to the report, 73% of enterprise data is currently unused for analytics. As well as being a tech issue, that’s a significant governance challenge. To help improve oversight of data, treasury must step into the architect role to define what outputs are required and ensure the right data gets ingested, categorised, and surfaced in a usable form.

“Too many teams sit at the end of a reporting pipe,” Attenborough explains. “But if the pipe’s upstream logic doesn’t include the right liquidity drivers or foreign exchange [FX] exposures, the dashboards are almost irrelevant. Leading treasury functions are shaping the data model, not just consuming it.”

Achieving that means getting involved in ingestion and processing layers, not just front-end reporting. It also means upskilling around metadata, source-of-truth principles, and the role of APIs in connecting treasury to commercial operations. Of course, this is yet more new territory for most treasury leaders to explore, and more on the to do list – but change always comes with choices and costs. 

Building your own bank 

If rearchitecting data lakes sounds too daunting, the report also highlights a more established area where transformation is already well underway – in-house banks (IHBs). Once a niche play, the IHB is becoming a more accessible tool for treasurers as technology enablers come into play. And in some circles, it is being seen as the ultimate treasury structure, a step up from the centralisation of the past.

According to J.P. Morgan Payments treasury benchmarking data:

• 71% of corporates concentrate cash physically
• 25% use notional pooling
• 24% conduct intercompany netting
• 18% have adopted on-behalf-of (OBO) payment structures

As part of the IHB trend, FX pricing, account rationalisation, and intercompany settlements are all increasingly managed in-house and across jurisdictions – at scale. But that sophistication often requires serious back-end infrastructure from netting engines to virtual account management, and tax-aligned loan tracking.

Thanks to the growing availability of these tech solutions, “the aim of an IHB is no longer just to achieve efficiency,” says Attenborough. “What you’re really building is an infrastructure that gives you the control and speed to act decisively in volatile conditions – because strategic agility matters more than ever.”

Preparing for the payments apocalypse

Meanwhile, the payments landscape is undergoing its own transformation, and once again, treasury’s role within it is shifting. No longer a back-office process, payments now intersect directly with customer experience, especially in e-commerce and platform-based business models. The numbers quoted in the report are eye-opening:

• Over 300 payment methods now exist globally
• 70% of online carts are abandoned due to friction at checkout
• Digital payments are expected to hit $8.6 trillion by 2030
• Embedded payments will reach $7 trillion in value by 2026

With this plethora of options, treasury’s job is no longer to pick a few rails and hope for the best. Teams must now manage payment strategy as a lever of growth, balancing speed, cost, control, and user experience. From real-time payments and tokenised rails to biometric authentication and request-to-pay models, the landscape is fragmenting and accelerating. And treasury teams wanting to remain competitive must keep pace.

The regulatory tidal wave 

Alongside all the innovation treasurers are also wrangling new regulations. Over the next three years, the report warns, a series of regulatory changes will reshape treasury operations – from EU Instant Payments and DORA to Basel IV, CBDCs, and the potential for new settlement timelines. 

These changes require more than mere compliance. They demand planning – for policy updates, system upgrades, workflow redesign, and risk impact modelling.

Against this backdrop, the report’s closing message is clear. Treasury’s future requires intelligence, resilience, and adaptability to be built into every decision. As Attenborough puts it: “The treasuries that will thrive aren’t the ones with the best forecasting models. They’re the ones that can absorb the unexpected alongside the expected – and continue to move at speed. That requires the right infrastructure, systems, policies, and mindsets.”

So, we’re back where we started. Two futures. One where treasury keeps fighting fires with spreadsheets. Another where treasury designs the architecture that anticipates them.

But the choice isn’t theoretical anymore. And the clock is ticking.